Here once was a colossus cultural phenomenon nonpareil — SPB — a peerless performer par excellence whose magical, mellow voice saw legions of listeners drawn like bees to a honeycomb, as if a Pied Piper has cast a spell upon them to transport them to an Elysian world. Like many of his ilk in his time, […]
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Aparna Sen Where the bee sucks, There suck I; In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry; On the Bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily , merrily shall I live now, Under the blossom That hangs on the bough. -The Tempest, Act V, Scene I With […]
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When renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz watched Gaman (1978), he was overcome by so many emotions that it was nearly impossible not to say anything about it. He wrote a letter to Muzaffar Ali, the 34 year-old adman who had directed the film. Faiz wrote, “Gaman is a poem in visuals. Its tragic lyricism and […]
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Dev Anand was Dorian Gray, Peter Pan and matinee idol all rolled into one. There may only be a handful of actors or filmmakers anywhere in the world whose career spanned 7 decades. Dev Saab, as he is still remembered, was one of the most positive persons I have ever met. His effervescent charm, his […]
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A perspective peek at the nonet of films that have pitchforked Mysskin into the exalted realm of Kollywood’s cinematic sense Straddling the Kollywood movie marquee in the last dozen plus years like a lodestar among his peers, Tamil film director Mysskin, nee Shanmugha Raja, since his trailblazing debut in 2006 with Chithiram Pesuthadi, has […]
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Pandemic pummels cinema into existential vortex Don’t open the pod bay doors, Hal. We need social distancing. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Nothing can be alarmingly apocryphal than the above lines from the nearly four decade old film. ‘Social Distancing’ has become the new lingua franca of human transaction in this pandemic times […]
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Film: Tape 39 | presently streaming on Mubi Director: Amit Dutta The cinematograph can be defined as a writing with movements and sound. The essential problematic of the cinematograph lies precisely within this question—how can the cinematograph move beyond the manifest reality? This manifest reality is the apparent space and time represented before the […]
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Throughout the history of cinema, the dominant ideology determined the content. It is predominantly capitalistic, male and heterosexual. Likewise, film criticism too established its territory. Malayalam cinema Tracing back to the fifties, film criticism popularised by the trio Cinic, Kozhikodan, and Nadhirsha was mostly engaged with the text, rarely exploring the sub-text, inner dynamics, or […]
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Hindi Film world is a huge store house of love stories i.e films. But only a few films, especially love stories, had made lasting impression upon the viewers and one fine day they receive the title of cult film. Love Story, released on February 26, 1981, is a movie without a director’s name. Hindi films […]
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That reviewer Parthajit Baruah is well read, as professors of English (and cinema) should be, is clear from the number of references to literature as well as quotes from books that he uses in ‘Face to Face – The Cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’ to illustrate his points. That he is completely cued in to the […]
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